{"id":148,"date":"2011-10-12T21:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T20:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2011\/10\/for-atheists-the-dead-can-live-but-only-if-theres-no-corpse.html"},"modified":"2014-11-14T22:34:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T21:34:33","slug":"for-atheists-dead-can-live-but-only-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2011\/10\/for-atheists-dead-can-live-but-only-if.html","title":{"rendered":"For atheists, the dead can live – but only if there’s no corpse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In a fascinating new study psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware than individuals who are completely, stone-cold dead. That\u2019s weird enough, but the interaction with atheism is weirder still!<\/p>\n

They ran a few experiments, all with a similar set up. People were told about two different dead people, one in a persistent vegetative state (i.e. brain dead), and the other one dead and buried. For example, David has a car accident, and then either dies, or his \u201centire brain was destroyed, except for the one part that keeps him breathing. So while his body is still technically alive, he will never wake up again<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

People tend to accept that the dead are likely to be mentally impaired. They\u2019re less likely to be aware of their environment, have emotions, a personality, to remember events from their life, be able to influence current events, know right from wrong.<\/p>\n

Bizarrely enough, however, the dead score higher on all of these than the brain dead. In the words of Gray et al, the brain-dead are more dead than dead!<\/p>\n

Of course, not everyone thinks this way, and here\u2019s where it gets really interesting.<\/p>\n

Instead of just saying that David died in the car accident, they embellished the story to go into details of what happened to the body: \u201cAfter being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground<\/i>.\u201d And they also asked people how religious they were.<\/p>\n

The graphic shows the results. For the religious, it didn\u2019t matter whether they just said David was dead, or went into details about the corpse. Religious folks thought that David\u2019s mind survived regardless \u2013 except course, if he was brain dead. Dead people have a mind, brain-dead people don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For the non-religious, the corpse mattered. If there was a corpse, then David\u2019s mind was dead \u2013 just as dead as if he was brain dead. That\u2019s good \u2013 that\u2019s what the non-religious are supposed to say. Dead people don\u2019t think.<\/p>\n

But if they didn\u2019t mention the corpse, well then even the non-religious were tempted to say that David\u2019s disembodied mind persisted somehow. They weren\u2019t as confident as the religious, but there seems to be a nagging suspicion that David\u2019s mind lingered on after death.<\/p>\n

Gray and colleagues conclude that this is more evidence that we have an instinctive belief in mind-body dualism. Because brain dead people still have a living, breathing body, our instinctive thoughts about the mind become confused, and we get to thinking that the mind has been destroyed in some way that\u2019s even more severe than actual death.<\/p>\n

The non-religious, like the religious, tend to think of dead people having a mind. However, \u201cEmphasizing the body of the deceased allowed non-religious participants to understand death as a state without mind\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"ResearchBlogging.org\"<\/a><\/span>
\nGray, K., Anne Knickman, T., & Wegner, D. (2011). More dead than dead: Perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state Cognition, 121<\/span> (2), 275-280 DOI: 10.1016\/j.cognition.2011.06.014<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a fascinating new study psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware than individuals who are completely, stone-cold dead. That\u2019s weird enough, but the interaction with atheism is weirder still! They ran a few experiments, all with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFor atheists, the dead can live - but only if there's no corpse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a fascinating new study psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2011\/10\/for-atheists-dead-can-live-but-only-if.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"For atheists, the dead can live - 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